Mixpanel Trends Report: How will the next generation use computing?

By mixpanel on September 16, 2013

The technology we grow up with has a powerful and lasting impact on the
devices, software and products we choose to use. We adults--those born before
the 90's--did not have connected devices available at all times as kids.
Growing up my mom always made sure I had a quarter to use the payphone to call
home, something that never crosses my mind with my kids.

Today kids are surrounded by and have regular access to connected devices
starting at a very young age. As a mom, I am amazed to see my two year old
pick up our family iPad, unlock it and quickly navigate to her favorite app.
She can do this without even being able to say the word "iPad". She calls it
the "dooby doo" after her favorite cartoon (what can I say the kid has good
taste). Daily use of computers, tablets, mobile phones and other portable
learning devices is the norm for this generation. They are growing up
connected and have a different level of expectation about what they should
expect from a digital service.

To understand this better, we took a closer look at mobile game apps as this
is the one vertical with strong usage across all age ranges. We've taken a
sample of anonymized data from three types of games running on iOS devices:

Games designed for kids under the age of 10

Games with a primary audience of adults (defined as age 20+)

Games that have strong usage across age groups to act as a control

Kids are not using phones. Instead tablets are the center of action with 77%
of activity in game apps for kids taking place on these devices.

Comparatively, adults are all about their mobile phones (no surprise if you
walk down any city street and look at the people around you). The game apps
with a primarily adult audience have 65% of their activity taking place on
mobile phones.

To put this in perspective the game apps that appeal to all ages have a much
more even spread of activity across devices. The developers of these games
need to make sure their apps perform well on all devices.

Now this probably has a lot to do with who is purchasing the devices, but this
heavy use of iPads and iPod Touch will impact the baseline expectations of
these kids on what their device interaction should be. Are kids today going to
be happy with the smaller screens of mobile phones? Or are the "phablets"
going to become an even bigger category as kids get older and start purchasing
their own devices? Or will kids become true multiple device users, staying
loyal to their tablets even after they have their own phones?

Fred Wilson set the bar for
retention when he said that most
app developers will only see 30% of their installed base come back and use
their app at least once a month. But an average of app retention disguises
many of the variables and does not give app devs a more precise benchmark for
what they should expect. Recently at Mixpanel's
DDC2013 event, Omar Hamoui, a partner at
Sequoia Capital and founder of AdMob and ChurnLabs, shared how he set their
retention goal at 40% when they launched their first app, only to miss the
mark within the first week. So does Fred Wilson's 30% benchmark hold steady
across age groups?

The short answer is no. Game apps for kids have a markedly lower rate of
retention. On average they only retain 12% of their customers after one month.
But on the bright side, the majority the customers they retain do stay active
after month two.

Game apps for adults solidly beat the 30% benchmark. On average apps with a
primary audience of adults retain 41% of their customers after one month. They
also keep most of these one month customers for a second month before
retention really starts to drop off.

Apps that have a wide spread demographic also have an equally wide spread rate
of retention. On average these apps retain 28% of their customers after one
month--much closer to Fred Wilson's 30% mark.

Surprisingly all age groups keep their mobile device software up to date. I
had assumed, given the difference in devices used across age groups, that the
OS software might not be kept up to date on devices used by kids. But people,
regardless of age, keep their iOS version up to date.

The data in this report is based on an aggregated set of the more than 15+
billion actions analyzed by Mixpanel each month. In Mixpanel, an action is
defined by our customers and can be anything from logging in to an app to
making a purchase or finishing a level in a game. The data in this report is
segmented by games designed for kids under the age of 10, games with a primary
audience of adults (defined as age 20+) and games that have strong usage
across age groups to act as a control.

The report analyzes actions during July and August 2013. During this period of
time 50% of actions analyzed by Mixpanel took place on desktop devices and 50%
took place on mobile and tablet devices, as shown by the Desktop vs Mobile re
port on Mixpanel Trends.

This Community Tip will take you step-by-step through implementing Mixpanel with Google Tag Manager for tracking page views, link clicks, and form submissions.
Pros and cons of implementing Mixpanel with Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free application that allows users to remotely alter & activate certain code snippets that fire in a web or mobile app, without requiring direct access to the codebase or an App Store resubmission. GTM works by having you install a single code snippet, which fetches and runs any custom script "tags" you've set up within GTM's own UI based on "triggers" that you've identified. GTM can be particularly handy if you're in charge of your product's analytics, but would need to take up a developer's time in order to make any changes to the codebase. The software allows you to alter isolated portions of your code via a relatively int...

Super Properties give you the power to cohortize user actions by descriptions of your users. This Community Tip lists many useful super properties by industry or focus, and describes how to implement super properties with any of Mixpanel’s client-side SDKs.
Note : Super Properties are supported in all Mixpanel client-side libraries: JavaScript , iOS , Android , and AS3 .
What is a Super Property?
Generally, Super Properties are things you know about the user rather than about a specific event - for example, the age, gender, advertising source, or initial referrer.
To make things easier, you can register these properties as super properties. If you tell us just once that these properties are important, we will automatically include them with all events sent. Super properties are stored in a browser cookie or local storage, and will persist between visits to your site ...

Today’s Community Post will cover the ins and outs of list properties. We’ll go over how to set list type properties and why you want to use them.
What is a list property?
Event properties are a great way to send Mixpanel a lot of detailed information about how users interact with your website/app. In addition to lots of awesome property datatypes (numbers, strings, booleans), we support list properties.
List properties are as simple as the name sounds—it’s a property containing a list of information! List properties allow you to describe dimensions that contains more than one value.
When would you want to use a list property?
You would want to use list properties whenever you have more than one value for a given property. Some examples:
Items purchased in a “Checkout completed” event
Multiple artists for a “Song Played” event
Experiment groupings for A/B ...

This Community Tip will illustrate how to interpret Mixpanel’s Addiction Report. We’ll walk through some best practices and methods for using the Addiction report to analyze your users’ behavior with an eye towards actionable insights.
Our Retention report shows the portion of your customers or customer cohorts who engage with your application. Mixpanel’s Addiction Report takes it to the next level and analyzes the minimum number of hours or days your users engage with your app.
How to interpret an Addiction Report
The first column of the Addiction report displays the number of users in the cohort displayed on that row, just like our First Time and Recurring Retention reports. In the screenshot below, it means that 6,054 unique users fired an “App Open” event on February 1st. Each of the buckets (column headings) to the right indicate how many hours in day, days in a week, or day...

We've made Segmentation a whole lot better, and we're excited to share all the updates we've made:
See an overview of your top events
We've made it possible to see an overview of the highest volume events that your users take in your app. It can help you see spikes in your data, and it's just a convenient way to get a snapshot of how things are going.
Compare trends more easily
Comparing two or more different events is now possible, so you can analyze the correlation between events. Just click the compare menu option after picking the first event.
Plot your data in logarithmic scale
It can often be tough to compare two trends if one event or segment dwarfs another or if your app takes off and creates a big spike in your metrics because the big differences in scale make it hard to see what's going on. With a logarithmic scale, you'll be able to compare and correlate...

This Community Tip will outline how to create incremental super properties using our JavaScript SDK, so you can keep a tally of how often a user takes specific actions on your site or in your app and then segment any event by count.
What Makes A Super Property So Super?
Before we dive in to incremental super properties let’s have a quick reminder of what super properties are. Super properties are client-side properties that are automatically attached to every event that a user sends to your Mixpanel project. They make working with Mixpanel data much more convenient because they act as global properties that are omnipresent in all your events (given that the cookie is not cleared). Some examples of information that you may want to attribute to every event are ad campaign, signup date, or paid account type, etc. It’s important to note that super properties are only for events , not...

Today we launched a major enhancement to our notifications dashboard that will give you more power over your one-time notifications. Previously a one-time notification meant sending a message to the wind. While useful for notifying, they couldn't be edited, cancelled, or analyzed after the fact. No longer - now one-time notifications are at your beck and call:
The new notifications dashboard gives you a clear view of what one-time notifications are in flight and allows you to cancel them or even change their contents before they send. You can now view sent, opened, and conversion statistics for one-time and recurring notifications through the same analytics page:
Our goal behind these changes is to better unify the notifications product and expand what you can do with it in the process. We give you better tools, you make better things happen. With that in mind, happy notifyi...

When it comes to Mixpanel products, we’re all about constantly making improvements that our users have asked for. Regarding the formulas report, one thing we’ve had numerous requests for is the ability to add numeric values into a formula. Well Mixpanellers, ask and ye shall receive:
The most basic and useful application of this is a formula where you would like to see percentage values rather than decimals. In our case, let’s look at a common event and take the number of mobile occurrences divided by total occurrences:
As you can see, the x-axis values are calculated as decimals between 0 and 1. In order to transform the values in this chart into percentages, all we have to do is multiply the numerator by 100:
And there you have it, a simple addition to formulas that greatly increases their flexibility. For more use cases and ideas, get in touch with our extremel...

This is a guest blog post by Derek, Fleksy's Head of Product Marketing
I have a confession: there was a time when data and I didn’t get along.
I’m a brand marketing guy at heart, and my data-related technical skills are limited. Luckily, I have pretty good instincts. For years, I often viewed heavy data-diving as an aggravating drain on my time. Interpreting data? No problem. Manipulating it? Big problem.
I would spend hours slicing data on Google Analytics, Flurry or other tools in every way possible, but more often than not I couldn’t find the key insight I really wanted. The only way I could extract meaningful insights was to task a database engineer/analyst to manipulate raw data to fit my needs. If I needed to make a quick decision, I had no choice but to trust my gut.
At Fleksy, we’re building the fastest and most fun keyboard app in the world, and we’re iterating rap...